


Pentamerone

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Coffee Shops, Drama, Established Relationship, Fake Character Death, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Falling In Love, Forced Bonding, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Memory Loss, Obliviation, Obsession, Post-Canon, Post-War, Romance, Scars, Sharing a Bed, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-02-18 13:14:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18700324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: A DNA testing service can analyze spit and blood for what they call a "soulmate". Harry has had his done, Severus considers.Or, a love poem in five acts.





	Pentamerone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Likelightinglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likelightinglass/gifts).



> To likelightinglass, who dared me to write tropes and received this strange love poem instead.  
> 

 

_Art by likelightinglass._

 

"One day, tens of millions of years from now,

someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world

they have never seen, and when they crumble me

between their fingers, it will be you they find."

Jeanette Winterson, _The Stone Gods_

 

There is nothing much here at the end of the earth. There is an old man and his bit of stick, picking his way through dried and solidified lava flows. There is a fine dusting of volcanic ash in the air, tephra like salt on a slab of meat, like confetti after a party. Forgotten. No, there is not much at the end of the world. Just rocks and flowers. Flowers came before us, they will last long, long after.

He calls himself Tiresias. No one questions him. No one questions the long white hair; no one questions the long white beard. At the end of the world, perched at the distal end of time, what does it matter? The sky is changing; the stars have shifted. He has watched a supernova. It was called _Antares_ once, named with words borrowed from ancient Greek. Tiresias picks a gnat out of his beard. They are not so dissimilar, he and Antares. He is also named with words from long-dead men.

"Weird name. How'd you get that then?" The others had asked. How indeed? He is no prophet; he is not entirely blind. (The Greek Tiresias had killed the snakes and Hera, displeased, had turned him into a woman for seven years. Seven years of out of sorts; seven years of out of bounds. Womanhood was a punishment then.)

"I'm a snake-killer," he said. And that was that.

At the end of the world, what is left? Only the stories. _Tell us a story, Tiresias._

 

* * *

 

_What kind of story? A love story? A ghost story? A sea shanty? A myth?_

_Tell them all. Tell them all. We have time enough._

 

* * *

 

_Tintagel_

_2025_

 

A letter has come. Gripped by owl beak, brushed by white feather. A perfectly ordinary cream envelope, perfectly ordinarily addressed to one _Severus Snape, The Little Cottage, Tintagel._ It's the flourish of branding across the envelope that raises Severus' blood pressure. Sounding the alarm. War drums. The clench of unfortunate teeth. What does it say? _Hocus Pocus Helix: Find your magical soulmate today!_ Severus prods it with the end of his wand. His glares have terrified scores and scores of first-years yet, now, it is entirely wasted on a bit of inert parchment. _Pity._ He looks up toward the sound of the kitchen. His hair pale as a ghost now, wiry too. Look at the start of age spots on his hands; look at where the skin sinks into the dips and valleys between tendon and vein. Older now, still just as grease-stained and sharp as corrugated steel. “Do explain exactly _why_ you want me to open this monstrous letter?”

“Come on, Severus. Just a bit of fun, yeah?” The sound of boiling water, of the toaster. The sound of the refrigerator door. Harry and his absurd fascination with cooking the _Muggle_ way. Severus shakes his head slightly. ( _"It tastes different, you know, when you cook by hand. That's how you get the love in there."_ Ridiculous notion.)

“Nothing _fun_ comes delivered by owl post.”

“I don’t know, you got rat spleens last week. You left them on top of the curry takeaway too, you know."

“Harry, do be serious."

Harry steps out of the kitchen, drying his hands on a dishrag. "I am serious," he says quietly. "You don't have to open it. I just - just want to hear you sometimes. You know, hear you tell me how you feel about me. I thought this might - " It is not said to a face, to eyes, to a Pensieve. Harry says it to the glass of water left on the sideboard, to the woodgrain of the table.

Severus scoffs. "Trite words." He narrows his eyes. "Would you believe me if I did?"

A frown, a look to the window. This is it, the question. You either know it in your bones (or there is nothing there at all). "Try me."

Severus sits at the table in silence for close to twenty minutes. Harry finishes the dicing, turns down the pot. He sits down, running his hand through his hair. It’s due for a trim (it’s always due for a trim.) He tips back in the kitchen chair, tempting the usual censure. _"Quit leaning back like that, you'll snap your neck."_

"And if I don't?" Twenty minutes later, still the same conversation.

"It doesn’t matter,” Harry sighs. “I just want to hear it sometimes.”

“Do you doubt me?”

“Have I ever?”

Severus has acid rain in his mouth even now. _You thought I was trying to kill you once (maybe I should have)._ The two bits of him, the man and the monster too. _Get a grip on yourself, Severus._ Harry fiddles with the envelope, the bit of paper. They haven't opened it. Therein, in fact, lies the rub. "I won't make you open it," he says quietly, "and I won't make you tell me anything. I'm just - I need to hear it sometimes."

"You know who I am. If you wanted _romantic_ nonsense, you should have married the Weasley bint. You knew before -"

Harry takes his glasses off, rubbing the nasal bridge. (This is not the first time they have had this conversation.) "Yeah, yeah, I know,” Harry says. “And her name is _Ginny._ You see her at every holiday, Severus.”

Past the window, heavy clouds lay steadily. Dark, Payne’s Grey. Ship-drowning clouds. He has always preferred storms, the promising humidity in the air, the cool of water like a blanket on bare skin."There's a storm coming," Severus mutters, changing the subject. "Have you closed up the house?" _Don’t. Leave the windows open, turn the lights off. Let’s spend it in lightning and candlelight. Peel my clothes off, my skin off too. Let it come, let it cover me, this bit of rain._

"Yes. I covered the boats too."

"Good."

“I should double-check the upstairs.”

Severus nods.

Harry stands, Severus follows him to the narrow staircase. He stops short when Harry pauses on a step. "Severus, I - " A pause, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't push."

"No," his sharp voice. "You shouldn't." Then sudden eye contact, the mouth to mouth. _Remember to breathe._ Harry can hear a voice in the back of his mind, it is not his. A quiet _let me tell you something._  A quiet _do you remember where this started?_ "But you have every right to know."

Severus' hands push Harry back against the wall. Photographs rattle. Nervous arousal snaking up the spine of him. _Why do you still do this to me?_ Harry, forty-five-years old and greysilver in his hair. Severus and his whittle-knob knuckles, his walking stick fingers, curling about his hips, holding him strong and steady against the matte eggshell paint. Harry moans at the sudden angry grip, the knock of the Legilimencer at the door of him. _Let me in, let me in. Say yes, say yes. (Harry always says yes yes yes.)_ The mouth at the gate is no stranger. Harry turns to give Severus room. Teeth over the carotid, counting out heartbeats with his tongue.  
  
"Do you remember the Shack?" He hisses, his one good eye focused on Harry’s heavy breathing, the flush at the nose, the cheekbones.

"Yes, god, always. Always."

"Then keep your damn mouth shut and do try to apply your admittedly limited focus to listening." (Try to pay attention to the man with one hand up your shirt, sneaking behind the curtain.)

 

* * *

 

_Do you love me?_

_Like a worm loves the soil and the eels love the sea._

_Tell me._

_Do you need to hear it?_

_Yes._

 

* * *

 

_Hogsmeade (A memory of a shack on a hill.)_

_2005_

 

Severus is forty-five years old; Harry Potter, dark spot of his miserable existence, is twenty-five.

It is dark. Still wet from rain. The clouds are still heavy and soaked, the color of battleships and shale, the color of his damp socks. The woodboards of the walls and the floor always smell like reawakened rot for days after a rain. Nothing of the petrichor of outside, the damp grass and the wildflowers too, the bubbles of water on late-spring wisteria. The bit of soft earth, worms in their soil. Here, in here, it is dust when dry and rot after rain. (He had liked it once; he has been here too long to like anything anymore.)

His foot catches on a rock. " _Fuck_ ," he hisses under his breath. Despite living in these walls and secret passages for close to two years, he still does not know every rock, every little dip and drop.

"Who's there?" A voice in the dark.

Severus says nothing. _Godfuckingdammit_. He stays in the walls. He has spent years here, in these rooms, in these walls. He knows them in the dark, by feel. Touch and go.

"Are you a Ghost?" The man's unsteady voice again. It is familiar. He has heard it over and over and over again. He is tired of this voice. It runs in with his internal monologue, familiar and yet so well-remembered that it is half-forgotten. _Get the fuck out of here, Potter. Haven't you done enough to me?_

Scale back, where are we? Look now at this miserable rawboned man, pale as sour milk, pale as maggots. His tangled black hair, grown well past his shoulders. Look at the rags of his once-presentable robes. He still wears a frockcoat, though it is covered in dust and half the buttons are missing. In the walls of this shack on a hill, there is no one here to care. Look still, when he turns his face to the little squint of light. See the way his face moves like a storm over the sea, one half quiet and still, the other crumpled as a thrown-out grocery list. The scars that pillage half his face. Some are raised and run over the planes of his face like rivers and tributaries. There are little valleys too. They move from silver to pink. Pink as the inside of a salmon thrown on a dock, knifed and gutted from tail to head, the butchered flesh of the thing. Yes, pink. Worse yet, look at the eyes. See the Neptune-strange whiteness of the one set within the ruin. It does not focus on you.

Severus Snape, the half-blind. We must understand the nature of snakes and their bites. We have studied snake venom, know it to be brimming with zootoxins designed only for death. Nagini had been a pit viper, slick and fast-moving. He had been lucky to keep even one eye.

Severus Snape, the ghost in the walls, nursing a splitting headache and remembering only scraps from the table. _Harry goddamn Potter_ . Severus grimaces, baring his teeth to stained walls and torn insulation. All this is, of course, Potter's fault. Good-for-nothing, inconsiderate, _useless_ Potter. His face is a volcano as he settles on Potter. A regular Krakatoa. He hates it all indiscriminately. This bit of wood beneath him, the cracking plaster behind him, the smell of rot and dust. He curls his fingers together, weighing the options of crushing his fist into the idiot's face. Yes, he might break his hand against Potter's zygomatic arch, shatter his metatarsals. It'd be worth it.

_Yes, let me destroy you. Wreck your godforsaken face. Who would love you then, Potter? What magazines would put you on their covers then?_ His long fingers move to the ruin of the left side of his own face. (It is a habit to touch the scars.) That is over. A long time ago. Seven years. Still, this awful scar like a canyon on his face, like mountain ridges and fjords, this interruption. He remembers how the cell-death had spread. He remembers how the mottled-plum bruising had stretched out from the spell-sealed wound. Red and puffy, this rosy-fingered dawn on his cheek and up around the eye. His head had ached, his gums had bled. He had thrown up all day and all night; he could not stand. Eventually, the very skin had died, turning necrotic and dark. If he had been ugly before, he is monstrous now. These ragged and red ridges of raised hypertrophic scarring. Itchy and violent. He abhors a mirror, shuns reflections. Keep to the walls, Severus.

"Come on _out_ , Ghost, keep me company," Potter slurs, dropping the bottle too hard on the floor. Severus curls his lip. He wonders if Potter would notice if he left. If the man would track the creak of the floor. He knows Potter, sharp as a razor. The skill he had borne at seventeen, the way he moves now as an Auror. Best not.

He lets his head drop back. It hits the pockmarked wall rather harder than he had expected. He is cold (he will never admit it, never allow himself to shiver; he has too much pride).

Potter hiccups. Severus' carotid artery throbs. He loathes Potter and he loathes this shack. It is a miserable place cut into the hill. (There is nowhere better for him to go.) What furniture had once existed is shattered, bears the deep grooves of clawmarks. Monsters had been here once. Have left their scars, their little miseries, their bags of bones. And Potter, slumped against the other side of the room and _hiccuping._ The idiot man goes to crack another bottle. _Goddammit._ Severus pulls the scarf tight across his face, moves in the dark, through the crack in the wall, takes the bottle away. _By all means, Potter, drink yourself to death. Just not on my watch._

"Oi," Potter drawls, feeling around on the wood floor, his hands coming back darkened with dust, "where'd it go?"

"I took it from you, you imbecile." (His voice is dusty with disuse, scratchy from the wound that never healed quite right. No one will know his voice.)

"You talk, Ghost?" Potter squints, as if trying to figure Snape out. Or figure out who the other person is at all. Then his heart-shaped face smooths out and his head drops back against the wall. _Must have been satisfactory. Do remind me to maim you later._ Severus thinks longingly of the non-Potter-afflicted. Yes, the rest of the lot in their rooms, in their comfortable beds. Not with an icepick-ache between their shoulder blades from sitting too long on the cold floor of the Shrieking Shack, babysitting a drunken hero. He slips the (admittedly nice) bottle into his inner pocket. (He's tempted to take the firewhisky out, drain the last like emptying a greasetrap.) He leans against the wall.

Potter hiccups again, then laughs. Severus watches Potter’s slumped body on the floor, the green windbreaker hardly sufficient for the cold nights of early May. He watches the boy, yes, and contemplates his favorite method of execution. First for Potter; then for himself. (He is fond the slowness of the rack. Yes, take the man, lay him down. Tie his hands and his feet to the four corners of the world and turn the crank.) "Who are you the ghost of?" Potter frowns, "Snape, that you? You almost died here, you know. Long time ago."

" _No_ ," Severus hisses.

"Yeah, okay," Potter hiccups, his eyes half-closed and heavy-lidded. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. "Guess that came later. Snape's dying. Not here. Almost here though. There's a spot over there, the dark one. His blood."

Potter points off into the general direction of the east corner. Severus stays silent, scratching at his chin, at the unending itch of himself. It doesn't matter what he says to the brat, as drunk as the miserable creature is. Potter will assuredly forget this by morning. “Can’t figure him out, Snape,” Potter’s got one eye open, peering at him like the Cyclops at Odysseus. Only fair, one eye to one eye. "I could never figure him out."

_Well, that makes two of us._ "You've pickled your liver, you idiot child. I _do_ hope you don't have anything important to attend to in the morning."

Potter glares, his knife eyes narrowing, keeping Severus in his sight. (Severus can see himself reflected in Potter’s eyes, perfectly contained and reflected by the glossy cornea over the dark pupil. Harry Potter, this strange mirror.) “I’m tired,” Potter whines.

“Bully for you.” But he kicks over a pile of musty wool blankets. Potter drops his head on them. Severus sighs, pushes himself up from his spot on the floor. _You make me do everything for you, don't you? You pathetic brat._ He stalks over, his hands curling around the edges of the blanket, pulling them further under the boy. Under the head, under the shoulders, under the body too. Potter blinks then, staring up at him, eyes green as dittany, green as gurdyroot. Severus stands still, crouched over him and bare. (The eyes. They had reminded him of Lily's eyes once, that once-upon-a-time friend. Potter is twenty-five now, his irises have darkened, shot through with amber. They do not remind him of anyone now. They are Potter's alone.)

“Aren’t you tired, Ghost?” Potter asks, rough and scratchy. He pats the blanket. "Do you sleep? C'mere." _You have no goddamn idea._ Yes, yes, yes. The exhaustion is in his hands and in his knees, in his fingernails, between his eyes. He considers the blanket, marginally preferred over the hard floor. It is large as an ocean, there is space enough for them both and for the Holy Spirit too. _Don't be a fool, your back will kill you tomorrow if you don't._ He lays down gingerly, his shoulder already complaining, keeping far from the other. Potter and he across a woolen ocean, the wine-dark deep. He thinks of seasickness, the tightness of his stomach.

“Don’t you dare vomit,” he spits. Potter just grunts. Severus takes some measure of comfort in the miserable way the man will feel in the morning. (He has a potion to help; he won’t offer it.) _I hate you. You have no idea, Potter. You should not be alone with me._ No, there is something in him. Something feral. It is there, lurking in the skull. His grey matter. Behind his eyes. He keeps it back there, locked up. His eyes are jail cells, his mouth a jailer. (Yes, he hates Harry Potter. That, unfortunately, is not the problem. His hate is clean and pure, bright as a forest fire. Yes, his hate is true. The problem is that long-legged Potter, long-armed Potter, lying in a trashheap of drunkenness, is beautiful. And Severus Snape, ruined and unredeemed, is not exactly unaware.)

Potter there, untouchable across the wide expanse of navy wool. Severus' fingers twitch. He stares at the starshine on the planes of his face, at the heart chin, the strong nose. With his face pressed into wool, it is easy to think of what it might feel like to find Potter across a bed. To reach and to touch and to not be shaken off. To come to see the swell of the boy's shoulder every morning and every evening, the sight given freely (the blankets less so). Perhaps still rain, yes, but with the heat on and the sheets clean and no termites in the wood. He grimaces, what else is there to do? So he settles and resettles and settles again. Look at the threads in the weave of the blanket. Look at where the threads run, to and fro and back and forth. The same little strands under Potter's head, under Severus' greasestained own. This connection, sewing them up.

The boy shifts, twitching suddenly. Sleep is not so betraying of the sleeping. Watch the sleeping, as Severus does. Harry does not move but to twitch his legs slightly, shift the shoulders. He does not moan, does not shift unconsciously closer. There is a spot of drool on the open mouth, a godawful snore. Worse, sleep is more betraying of the watcher. We cannot watch without the awareness of _I could do this for you every night. I could keep watch._ We begin to imagine and spiral out, slotting our own habits in against each other. We think _is this what it would be like to have you in my bed?_

Measurements. Severus is a scientist, he marks his life by measurements. Ask him now. He is defined by twelve inches, the interruption of skin across a blanket. His awareness of the sleeping boy, of his miserable heart and its terrible imaginings. Yes, he is laid out like a knife on this grindstone bed. Knives, when they are dull, can only sharpen or break when pushed against a grindstone. There are only two ways to go.

 

* * *

 

Hours pass. It is late. How long is night? Longer than he had remembered. Potter sleeps, the dead sleep of the dead-drunk. Not even a lover could find his alcohol-stench appealing (and Severus is no lover of Potter). He smells like sour wine and stale whisky, he smells like acrid sweat, like the dust of the floor. Yes, he smells like kerosene and neglect. _You stupid, idiotic, infuriating (beautiful) fool._

Beautiful. There’s the rub. Any fool with eyes can see it. He should not see it. His skin crawls with the thought of it. This ridiculous limerence, this absurd infatuation. Potter and his changing self. He had been a loathed urchin, too skinny and draped in robes that had drowned him in black wool. (Severus will swear up and down on a disemboweled road that he had hated the boy then. His hate had been fresh and real.) Now, this beautiful and strange man. Do not look at the long, pale arms and their ropes of sinewy muscle. Severus had loved him even then, long ago. Precariously balancing on the edge of seventeen, with ridiculous absinthe eyes and their propensity for staring too long. _You will reduce me._ Yes, he will never admit it. They can pour boiling oil on him, gouge out his eyes, pull out his fingernails slowly, one by one. He will never say anything. _For your sake, Potter, and for my own._ (What happens in his bed, in his shower, that is something else. A bed is not a man, so he admits nothing. He has no control, no pride, he is sick with himself. Yes, these long midnights and his sweat-soaked sheets, picking at himself with the excitement of an accountant. Of an executioner, dreading the deed. He loathes himself, he reviles the nights. Still, they come, Severus and his treacherous arousal, creeping into his mind, justified in the moment. Then, just after he comes, sticky on his black-haired belly, shelved again in shame. If he had been crueler to Potter for it, then the better for the both of them. Yes, these glacier-edges, these slippery slopes. _I cannot bear it._ )

What a joke to find Potter, drunken and idiotic, snoring across from him. This ocean of dark wool, this hard floor giving no compromise to his shoulder blades, these vestigial wings. _I hate you._ (Does he?) The blanket shifts with Potter. With his weight. He should not have laid here, in the night. (He will remember it later, his fist around his shame-red dick.) "Feels like Snape's here," Potter says, more to the blanket than to Severus. "Feel him."

Severus tries to breathe in all the air at once. He coughs. Potter, half-asleep, quirks a brow but doesn't open his eyes. "Shut up, fool."

How did it happen, this infatuation? The trick is that we assume our bodies make sense. The best argument against intelligent design, in Severus’ estimation, is how we work against ourselves. We are a hodgepodge. A bit of ivy, shooting out vines, hoping some will catch the sun. Severus’ DNA does not make any sense, he knows that. He is two-part. Yes, there is the Henry Jekyll; yes, there is the Edward Hyde. A chimera. Sometimes he can keep his mouth shut, keep the wretch in. _Can’t figure you out, Snape,_ Potter had said. Yes, he and Potter both. How can you come to an even sum when Severus Snape is a fraction? We should be 1/1 but he is 2/1. Two minds stuffed into one body. A horrible sausage, ready to burst. (He keeps his mouth shut, the part that will say _god, I need you. Let me touch you.)_

Potter, across a blanket that might as well be a sea. (He is no sailor.) He thinks about the sea. Wide, dark, and deep. He misses the sea, there is nothing of it here. The lake doesn’t do, no, he can see the other side. He craves the edge of the world. The sea in Yorkshire is famous for its old lighthouses. Ignored, covered with moss and lichen, left to curious puffins and idle foxes. Severus had had no place in his own house, so he had lived in the nearby lighthouse when he could. He had made up his own address, Severus Snape, The Old Lighthouse, (Somewhere Near) Cokeworth, Yorkshire.

He is a child of the sea.

Tonight, the world shrinks to nothing. What are we but little ships of skin and sweat adrift in the night? Yes, these sailors, this bed a boat. _This is the problem, the two of us._ The misery of the old ache. Severus is used to being impervious, he had come to punish Potter for his beauty. Tripped on his own arrow, nicked himself instead. Who hasn't fallen in love with Psyche? Though he is cold, always cold, even the lowest beat of his sluggish heart keeps him warmer than the rest of the shack. The arm at his side, brushing him. Severus wonders if this is what it feels like to have glass bones, to have himself broken at the slightest touch. He reaches a hand out, smoothing the hair from the sleeping man’s face. There is a bitter memory of a similar night on a similar cold floor. Too much has happened.

This is not the first time Severus has known the touch of Potter’s hair.

You see, this is not, in fact, the beginning. Perhaps, if we must use time as our measure, this is the middle. Where’s the fun in that? Useless thing, time. In time, this is the middle. In some ways, in many ways, this is where it starts.

Wait, let me show you how they got here.

 

* * *

 

_The present (once again)_

 

They have knocked up the stairs, the two in a clutch of back and forth of one and one adding and subtracting their mouths, their tongues, the available pieces of themselves. Harry pulls Severus by the crook of a black wool arm, pressing the other into the corners of the upstairs hall. Their hips knock against long-forgotten occasional tables, little picture frames, chests of drawers. Why do any of these matter? They do not, they do not need to be here, not now. (We can pick them up later.)

"God, I want you," Harry whispers. _Always, always, always. It is softer now, I get to sip of you every morning. I thought the way I love you would shrivel with time. I was wrong. What is wrong with eating? What is wrong with middle-aged? Give me fat and happy, leave the salt there on the table. Sit down a while, eat with me._ Harry runs his hands along the skinny shoulders (they will never be broad), along the shield volcanoes and basins of Severus' scar-written skin. He presses a kiss to each high point; he presses a kiss to the low ones too. Salt and sweat. "Take me to bed. Now."

"So demanding, aren't you?" The gunpowder brow arching, the voice always deep as the bottom of the sea.

"You have _no_ idea," Harry scrabbles at Severus' monk collar. _So many buttons, bloody hell._ He pushes his mouth to the soft space behind Severus' earlobe, rubbing the beardstart stubble against his skin, hoping for a rugburn. "I’m starving and I would like my mouth full. Does that sound _demanding_?”

Severus and his once-dark hair (interrupted by Sickle-silver), his always-dark eyes of Benedictine wool. Severus the monk, always buttoned to the top. The knife bones of his cheeks flush at the idea. "I still don't understand after all this -" Burnt pitch; scorched bone. Severus, this autobiography of black. He pulls at Harry, sharp against him. Hard as a shoehorn in his pocket, sharp as a housekey. How can he be hungry again? He has eaten already. (Severus, you have forgotten. Your appetite never leaves just because you have eaten once before.) "You know what I look like, you cannot be serious."

Fingers along a sharp jaw, the ripple of scarred skin. A ghost of a touch and a love song in it too. "You have no idea how serious I am."

 

* * *

 

 

_Let me show you how I want you._

_No one loves an ugly thing._

_I see nothing ugly here._

 

* * *

 

 

_Hogwarts_

_1997_

 

All stories must start somewhere. This one has buried the lede. We’ll talk of the beginning now. (Harry Potter is sixteen; Severus Snape is thirty-six.)

Harry is standing at the dorm window, sulking at the rain. Wool-blanket clouds and grey-sheet rain, the color of mirrors and sword-steel. "Rotten luck, mate," Ron says. There is more ink on the end of his long nose than on his parchment. ( _"How Advances in Genetic Understanding Influence Magical Theory"._ Ron has whined about this assignment for weeks. These witch and wizard scientists and their exploration for a magical gene.)

"I can't believe this," Harry falls on the bed, his arms flung out, moaning into his pillow. _Why me? Why him? Why this?_ He lays on his back, arms behind his head, watching a spider build a web in a corner of the ceiling. It is oddly comforting, these old habits. How many times has he laid in his little cupboard, doing the same? Like watching old hands crochet a blanket, this back and forth, this knitcraft. (Sadly, he does not often get to watch the spiders here. The house-elves are regrettably on top of the dusting, Where most castles would be teeming with old colonies, Hogwarts is strangely empty.)

Harry Potter is sixteen years old and has had, rather, a string of _remarkably_ bad years. What is true about Harry? Let us look at him. He is told he looks a bit like his father but has his mother's eyes. He doubts it a little. He has the heart chin and the gangly arms of his father. The oil-slick dark hair, wild as a bramble. But the bones are a bit finer, a little less confident in themselves. The brows are straighter and flatter. The nose is sharp as a boxcutter. His mouth is softer. He has a widow's peak where his father did not.

Let's look further. Harry is lean and his clothes are always a bit too large, despite his habit of sneaking food from the table. He is always last to leave Quidditch practice. His favorite fruits are grapes and pears. His favorite season is fall (his least is spring). It is a strange thing but he likes the smell of licorice and gasoline, of hellebore and tar. He likes lighting roman candles, staying too close to the bright explosion. And he _hates_ Severus Snape, Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, former Potions Master, Personal Enemy Number Two.

It is the last piece that is giving him some fair trouble. You see, doom had come to Harry Potter. Just that morning. In fact, it had come at precisely ten-thirty, when Professor McGonagall had informed Harry that he had an appointment to keep with the Headmaster and that she would be accompanying him. Perhaps, if you really wanted to split hairs, it had come at ten-forty-seven in the morning, when Dumbledore had given that soft smile, meant surely to be comforting, and performed the Tether charm. _"Harry, you must trust me that this is meant to keep you both safe. It is going to be alright. You are both at risk now with Voldemort's return, this will help us to know if you are not."_ (Snape, to his credit, had been paler than usual and comfortingly murderous. They had not had to touch. The Tether had shot from the Headmaster's wand and curled around both of them, a beautiful golden rope, before sinking into their skin. Fading. Harry had gone a bit green then, as if a Portkey had got him right after lunch. This very strange weight on his chest, the existence of Snape.)

"I'm doomed," he says, pillow getting into his mouth.

"Yeah, pretty much," Ron bites the head off of a particularly squirmy Chocolate Frog. "I mean, basically. Being Tethered to Snape?" A pause, "Can you feel him though? Like his thoughts? Bet he's thinking up a new sort of detention. Something really awful. Bet you're it."

_Bet I am._ "Not really." Harry pauses, considering. What can he feel? "I can't feel thoughts or emotions. It's just this constant… presence. He's just _always there._ " It is strange the way the bond weaves their magic. He finds himself thinking more about Snape, weaving the constant drumbeat of the professor into his daily life. In the magic, he can feel an incredible amount of restraint. The rollicking of _potential,_ the gentle _back, back, get back_ of control. They go weeks without speaking, but the black-robed figure remains constantly in the back of Harry's mind. It is there when he eats, when he sleeps, when he showers. There always as he moves through the stations of the day.

"Good morning." (Snape must be waking too.)

"Please pass the salt." (Does Snape like to salt the potatoes too? They're dreadfully unseasoned.)

Strange thoughts, strange times.

 

* * *

 

By the third week without speaking, Snape is an expected constant. Harry hangs back after class, a bit of forgotten flotsam. "Hello," he says, hovering at the desk.

"Do you have a _purpose_ for bothering me, Potter, or are you just giving me your best impression of a gnat?" Harry frowns, poking at a divot in the table. _It is like rivers_ , he thinks, _choked with floating pennywort_ . The weed grows too thickly, stifling the sun, dropping the oxygen, it is inhospitable to fish. Severus and his acidity, choking out the light. _Try to be nice to the rat bastard and he'll just bite you._

"Look, the Tether. I just want to know. Is it supposed to feel like this?" _You and I tied together. You're like cement boots. You'll drown the both of us._

"Like what, Potter?" Snape does not look up from his shuffle of papers, from the quill in his hands. For some unknown reason, it irritates Harry. Gets there, right under the skin.

"I don't know! Like an anchor or something, I can't get you out of my goddamn head!"

" _Language_ , Potter," Snape says slowly. Ice floes. "Ten points from Gryffindor for an _unpardonable_ display of incivility to a Hogwarts professor."

"Just tell me you hate it. Tell me you hate it too." _Tell me, tell me you fought this. That when the Headmaster insisted, saying it was the goddamn bloody best way, tell me you said no._

"I have larger concerns than a sixteen-year-old snotnosed brat." Snape finally looks up to glare, cauldron-faced. His cockroach-black eyes fascinate Harry, the way loathing can be distilled in a little spot of black, no bigger than a Knut. “Potter, get out. Haunt another classroom.”

“Last week, I could tell when - " _When they tortured you. The Tether gets heavier. I could feel you get heavier. You cement block. God, I hate you. (Be careful.)_

Snape flares. His nostrils, his shoulders. The threadbare robes of him. A bat in flight, a roach spreading its wings. “What do you want, a blasted _hug_ ? Do you imagine I _wish_ to be Tethered to a moody, self-centered teenage brat? If you want someone to coddle you, go sniff at someone else's damn skirts. Get _out_.”

Harry tightens his fist, lets it go. Over and over again, you see. An accusation on his tongue like a pill, unswallowed. What kind of accusation is this? _I saw you being human._ (What a uniquely awful thing to say.) He flares at the snarling half-crow, this half-peeled scab of a man. Snape and his dagger nose, Snape and his fishscale skin sitting at his paper-covered desk, chalk still on his sleeves. _What are you thinking of me? Is it as awful? Do you think of me differently?_ It is strangely comforting, going through the day, the motions of class and dinner, brushing his teeth and flossing too. Severus Snape, a bit of ballast, holding Harry upright.

"I hate this."

"How comfortingly unique," Snape sneers, his white-knuckles on the unfortunate quill. His thin-lipped mouth in a tense line. Harry wonders how Snape had responded to this absurd idea, tying the two biggest question marks of the war together. _We'll be able to tell if you are alive and safe. You'll be able to feel Professor Snape's general health and whereabouts. You must understand, Harry, this is crucial information._ “The Tether will be removed after.”

“After,” Harry says to this bucket of razors. _After. After the war. It won’t matter if we’re dead. If we live, well, then the Tether will go._ "It will go back to normal."

Snape's face twists like a thumbscrew. "If that _asinine_ lie makes you feel better to believe, then be my guest."

 

* * *

 

Later, much later, Harry will never be able to pinpoint if the Tether is the cause. The root of this. He can look safely at before, at his nights pure of any measure of dungeon bats and hissed names. Yes, his perfectly safe dreams of furtive Sixth Year girls and their soft hands. He can look at after, the dreams had come. His body pushed up against a scratchmarked desk, a quill dragged slowly down his throat, a pitched stare of something like fire, something like loathing. (Even after the Tether is removed, the dreams stay.) In bed, a Silencing Charm cast around his own, fucking his fist like punching a wall, trying to hang on to images of Cho's shoulder slipping from her unbuttoned shirt. Instead, the constancy of Snape, the furious and dark eyes, the mouth opening to hiss, hands clenching with ache to hit and to push and to slam against a wall and _oh god, just like that, hold me there, my head between your legs, choking me with how much you need it. I want you wild. Do you think of me? Like this? God, I'm insane. I'm losing it. What the fuck am I thinking? What do you look like underneath all that? Are you as desperate in bed? Make me forget things. My name, your name, the world too._

The Tether charm does nothing, not really. Harry cannot tell emotions, cannot hear Snape’s (no doubt awful) thoughts. It is only there, a constant presence, like an earring on an ear. A bit of weight; a bit of ballast. A constant melody of Snape tugging at him, this reminder of _yes yes yes I exist._ Harry cannot separate his daily tasks from the weight of Snape. He pokes at his pork chop with the thought of Snape poking at his own with a stainless steel knife. He picks out a shirt and wonders if this is what Snape is doing right now, rifling through a closet and sniffing shirts to see if they can be worn again? _Do you like to wash your hair or your body first? Do you like the sheets pulled up over you while you sleep? Do you kick your feet out? What is your favorite food? You must like some things, what are they?_

It is the worst of all possibilities, the Tether charm. It does nothing but remind him that Snape exists, does his own menial basic tasks. This scratch of day-to-day.

Yes, this worst of all things, to see Snape as suddenly, strangely, so human after all.

 

* * *

 

_Reality again,_

_Somewhere in a bedroom in Tintagel._

 

"At sixteen then? You _are_ a deviant, aren't you?" Severus' undercroft-dark brow raises. Harry lifts his head from his spot on the pillow, raising to the scarred half of Severus' ruined face. A kiss, lips to the collapse. _Let me love the parts of you that you do not._ He is awed sometimes, remembering the snake and her necrotic bite. Remembering how the venom had spread from the borehole in Severus' throat, racing along the veins and the arteries, spreading into his chin, his cheekbones, the orbital socket too. _Let me bite you, right here on the neck, right where she did. Let me suck the poison out. I don't care what you look like, I love this proof of you, what you've done. I love you for your history._

"You asked how it _started._ Besides, you kissed me before the Shack." The sheets are soft against him. Egyptian cotton, 400-count thread (Harry had insisted).

"Count that as … youthful indiscretion."

"When have you ever allowed yourself to be youthful?"

"Brat," Severus smirks, watching Harry move, shift over him, this dance to the end of his body. Harry's strong hands grip his thighs, nosing at a tussock of hair. Harry draws it out, the measure of the moment. There is a time for the tide to come out and for it to rush back. He hovers centimeters away from Severus' skin, this gooseflesh of an old potioneer, the muscles shifting tense and taut under his grasp. The flex of the thighs desperately saying _touch me touch me oh god touch me._ Harry breathes warm air over the open book of skin, whispering _be patient._

"What were you thinking?"

"When?"

"When you knew you loved me. The first time."

"You don't want that."

"I do." Severus pulls Harry down, his dark hair like a shroud. _Let me cover you, let me be your bit of linen when you finally go to the ground. Where are you going? Don’t close your eyes, stay with me. Right here, right now. Don’t talk about night, don’t talk about the dark. Not yet (not ever). I am right here. Look up, open your eyes. I’m waiting._

“Tell me,” Harry gasps.

So Severus does.

 

* * *

 

_Tell me about the first time._

_Very well._

 

* * *

 

_Azkaban_

_1999_

 

(Severus Snape is thirty-nine; Harry Potter is nineteen.)

Dark again. Severus is used to the dark. The dark was before light and will come after light. He knows the names of the dark, the umbra, penumbra, antumbra. He has as many names for shadows as sailors keep for waves. When we are experts, we learn the details. He is an expert of black. These walls of stone, their supports like ribs, as bleak as the three nights Jonah had spent inside the whale.  

He looks at the cell door, hopeful for a throat to be coughed back up through. No dice. His back aches, there is little comfort with cement floors. The cell reminds him of the woodshed. Out back, behind the row of council house slop. His muck of an address. The woodshed, past the little path, the sickly, yellow grass, was forgotten and thus his alone. We all have our childhood treasures. Groves of trees become castles, a pond an ocean. A woodshed is his battleground. He will be a soldier. (He has decided already; he is seven years old.)

There had been a long, skinny bit of metal in the shed. He had practiced striking. Swooping up and down like a rapier. No one had told him that it is 1967, that no soldier uses swords anymore. He had wanted to be a soldier then but he did not think of trench warfare, he did not think of mustard gas. (Seven years old, what child would?) He had arranged a half-deflated football on the stool, striking at it with his maybe-rapier. It fell to the ground.

“Aha,” he had said, “I took your head.”

When he hears the rats, scratching at the far corner of the room, it does not sound so dissimilar to that place far from here, under a polluted yellow sky, smelling of coal and trash with a shed in an old garden. In Cokeworth, age seven, he had wanted to be a soldier, had worn fish-belly skin, smooth as a fresh catch. Two-eyes, one for each part of him. Now, he is thirty-nine, he had been a soldier once, wears fish-belly skin, scar-torn and mottled with sick. The eyes, though. He reaches up to the right side, poking at the bandage with a too-long fingernail. He isn't sure he'll get to keep it, not with the venom creeping up. He isn't sure how he'll keep an eye on the Jekyll of him.

Severus Snape, snake-ruined.

* * *

 

 

The door clangs, rousing him from sleep. Day and night do not matter, so he sleeps as he can manage it. He blinks. _Potter._

“How did you get in?”

Potter shrugs, useless creature. The loose cotton of the shirt moves with him, little waves over his lean stomach, his wide back. An apologetic smile at the corner of his mouth. ( _As if Potter would ever be sorry in his rotten life._ ) “I convinced the guards that we’re having a tragic love affair and are secretly dating.”

Severus blanches.

“Look,” Potter says, setting his pile down on the little bed. “You can set them right later. But this way, you get reading material.” The blasted fool again, always knowing his miserable weaknesses. Severus grasps at the papers, the books, the periodicals, cursing his hungry hands. _It doesn't matter,_ he thinks, _it's just the once._

 

* * *

 

Potter comes, strangely, nearly every day.

The guards call back first, banging their rods against the metal bars of the cell. “Snape. Get up, ya bastard fuck. Your boyfriend’s here.” He scowls. _Fuck you._ Potter comes in shortly after. He doesn’t even have the decency to look abashed at being called Severus' _lover._ As if the _idea_ of loving Severus is as commonplace as nitrogen, as circulars, birdshit, as grass on the ground and birds in the sky.

Potter passes him the newest edition of _Potions Quarterly._ "You look really bored, I got you a few new things."

"Color me shocked, Potter," Severus drawls. "Between my predicament here and your scintillating company, why wouldn't I be absolutely enthralled?"

"Oh, shut up. I just wanted to know if you wanted to do something?"

"What? Take a tour of the gardens? See a film? Get some air?"

"Are you done being an arse now?"

"Not hardly."

"We could play a game."

"How pedestrian."

"Look, I'm Xs and you're Os."

"I will ruin you."

"How are you so impossible?"

“It’s delightful enough here _without_ your heroic presence.”

Potter rolls his eyes. “Guards are doing their rounds. Just hold my hand and say less-awful things, okay?” _Shut up and hold my hand and I’ll bring you cigarettes next time._ (Severus knows a good deal when he sees one.)

Potter’s hand put out, palm up. Clammy and strange. Severus has never considered touching Potter with gentleness before. The Jekyll of him has dreamt of taking a crowbar to Potter’s skull, has wondered at the exact shade of grey of Potter’s brain, the exact color of Potter’s blood. The Hyde of him, worse yet, has dreamt of pushing Potter up against a wall, trying to lock their atoms and jaws together. The violence of the nothing of them, this unspoken history, this spiderweb of _god knows what._ Yes, Severus and his miserable nights in his greysheeted bed, fucking his fist like shoveling a grave.

And just like that, Potter covers Severus' hand with his own. It is warm and strange. His heart in his throat, Hyde lashing at his tongue, trying to get out. Potter’s skin. Warm and damp. Sometimes we have unwelcome visions. Severus and this hand, given willingly, trailing down his lazy back. The color of morning. A dream of quiet. _Would you kiss me?_ Potter's hand is warm, warm as a firepit. Warm as a sunrise. Potter has always been white and black and green and wheat. Now, Severus understands, he is red. Not Gryffindor red, not blood red, no.

He is redshift, the redshift of ancient light, the redshift of a star. Severus knows the stars, he knows that as light moves further away from us, in time and in space, the wavelengths that reach us last are red. The oldest stars in the sky are red. Severus knows, as he goes to this black hole of nothing, that the last thing he will see is the light in Potter, shifting red against the dark sky. (The red of blood vessels of the backs of his eyelids. This same shade of stars.) He scowls. No good thinking about it.

"You can't put an O there."

"I just did."

"No, you can't, I've already got an X there!"

"Suffer, Potter," he sneers. "Nothing is fair."

 

* * *

 

Weeks pass. Severus expects Potter to stop coming (he is surprised, Potter comes always). One day, Potter shows up, pale and quiet. He is never pale, he is never quiet.

"Spit it out."

"They passed the sentence," the boy says. _Oh._ (They have been waiting for months.)

"Oh?" His Arctic-storm voice. "They haven't bothered to inform _me_ ." Potter says nothing, Severus could claw his skin off. " _Tell me_."

"I - " He trips over his own words.

"Potter, you accursed imbecile, tell me _what the fuck they are going to do to me_."

Silence, the weight of months. Dust. He knows already. He feels it in the pause. The boy doesn't need to say it but Severus needs to hear it anyway. _Say it, say it, say it._ "It's the death penalty."

Of course. That is how you treat a monster; that is how you treat a snake-killer. He thinks about his cells, his DNA. How did he come to the cruelty? Was he born to it or was he taught the whip? What about that monster inside? Worse yet, the one that likes rainstorms, collecting fossils. We never talk about Jekyll, some of us are more comfortable with Hyde. (It is easier to wear the worst of yourself.)

Potter comes closer. Severus realizes suddenly that he is shaking, that he has fallen against the stone wall and the concrete floor. The boy's hand comes up, hovering at the curve of the too-skinny face.

" _Don't._ " He closes his eyes. This room, the bit of earth trodden in on the bottoms of boots. If his fingers scrape at the mortar between the bricks, trying to erode the wall, who will care? He knows his fingerprints will tear long before the wall does. (He tries anyway.) His back aches. Long days of pacing, sitting on a poured cement floor. He picks at himself. It is awful to be seen in such misery. There is a point beyond caring. His hair like a nest, his hair like his dirty laundry, foul and everywhere.

"Is it bothering you?" Potter asks. (Severus is tearing at his hair, what else is there to do?)

"I'd rather just shave the rotten mess." _Not that it will matter soon._

"Come here."

_What does it matter anymore? Let him fuss._ He scowls but moves slightly closer. Potter reaches up to his hair, greasy again. (He has not been allowed a shower in two days.) His boxcar fingers with their square edges carding through it, using his hands like a comb. Potter is gentle. Severus aches, thinking of his moth-eaten robes and their tattered edges, not even good enough for black, settling somewhere in a mottled grey. Dark rust of blood stains. He closes his eyes.

"Does that feel okay?" Potter's voice like a low-level earthquake, threatening more. Jostling Severus about, breaking nothing.

_Yes._ He tilts his head slightly, leaning into the slight pull of Potter's quick fingers at a tangle. Potter, the unknotter of cords. _I want this. You. I've always wanted you. You should know better._ But what can he do to Potter here? He does not pray for a stay of execution. This is a blip in the glory that is the rest of a hero's life. What ruin can he wreak on Potter while the guards watch?

Just this once then. A bit of sun. (Rounds again; he presses dry, cracked lips to Potter’s temple. _Fuck, you fucking bastard, I’ll go mad for you._ )

"What can I do?" A quiet question in a low voice.

"Read, Potter. Just read." A rustle of newsprint. That clear voice. "Current research into the origin of life on earth and the earliest preserved fossils suggests that magic is endemic to humans, that it came in with us as we formed the first sparks of rational thought. It is a suggestion, by respected scientists at the University of Phantasmagoria, that magic is, in fact, a virus. Magical beings have a weakness in their cells that magic exploits, integrating into their DNA and replicating as a virus does. Not all men have this genetic weakness, explaining Muggles and Squibs. This weakness tends to be inherited, explaining the prevalence of magical families."

When he closes his eyes and lies back on the pallet, he could almost be anywhere. It looks like night when he closes his eyes, he could be anywhere that has a night. In Scotland or in Kansas. Ignore the smell of mold and rot, ignore the scrabble of rats, ignore the ache in your back. Breathe. It’s not so bad, is it? At least you know where you’re going. It’s a fair cop (he’s expected it all this time). Listen for the key in the lock, the sound of leather boots. They will come in the morning.

Just listen to the sound of Potter's voice, listen to the scrape of a bit of rain.

 

* * *

 

_Back, again, back always, to the present._

 

“Did you love me then?” Harry asks, drawing circles on skin.

"Is that what matters?"

"No, but I want to know." (A pause, the move of a mouth to the oven of himself. The firepit. Severus cries out when Harry takes him into his sea-wet mouth, his tongue as rough as sand. He watches, he always watches, trying to remind himself _yes, yes, yes this is real. Yes, I am alive. You are alive. You and I and oh my fucking god, do that again. I love you, god, how I love you. Let me tell you the ways._ )

When Harry moves up to nose at his throat, the divot of him, Severus stills his always moving hips. "Your turn, brat."

Harry smirks, "Oh? Is this a game?"

Severus breathes into his ear, nestling his words soft there in the space of him. "Isn't everything?"

 

* * *

 

_I lost you once. I never stopped looking._

_Don't go off again._

 

* * *

 

_Pew (A nothing village)_

_2003_

 

(Let us catch up. Harry Potter is twenty-three; Severus Snape, dead man, would be forty-three.)

Have you ever met a ghost?

We all have a ghost or two in our pockets. A phantom concealed in old pictures and letters, hiding like a beating heart under the floor. Ghost stories stretch back to our earliest memories. Into the oldest histories. We find them in Egypt, pick them up off of the ground in ancient Sumer and Babylon. Dusty and forgotten. Every human civilization has produced the idea of the haunting dead, of spirits of our once-living selves that walk amongst us. The thing about ghosts is, well, they're everywhere.

Harry is everywhere. He has taken to wandering. Traveling. He looks for shadows and sunshine. Spots of rain. Sometimes he sees a head with long, dark hair and follows it for a while, but it is never the port he seeks. _I miss you._ Is it strange to miss a rock in your shoe? Harry turns it over and over again. The ache that he knows, the memory of scathing words from an old professor. _I hated you once. You were awful. God, I hated you. The things you said, to me, about me, about my father, my friends. I wanted to leave you in Azkaban (I would have). Now the world seems strange without you._

Ron visits with him every Friday. They go to the pub, pull the same taps.  "You alright, mate?" Ron asks, "You're looking tired."

"I'm fine." ( _Fine,_ we know, means _no, but don't ask questions. Go look for stories somewhere else, like a blind man on a rock._ )

Beyond Fridays, Harry is aimless. When you can Apparate anywhere, why is there any one place to be? He has no anchor to root him, no port in a storm. Nothing to tether him to a rock. He checks into inns and hotels, preferring forgettable wallpaper and bland floral bedspreads to sitting at home. At home, he is restless, antsy. He moves around too much, startles the owls at the window. Eventually, living out of motels, he forgets that they aren't home. "What's your address?" they ask Harry. He almost says _the Hilton_ but stops at the last second. He hasn't been to his apartment in months but it still says his name, right there printed on a Ministry-issued ID card. It must be true. Is it true? (A fact, the truth. We could leave at a moment’s notice, never look back on this floor, these four walls. If love says _follow me_ , then let me tell you the very real truth that under home address, we should find our lover's name.)

Lately, he is staying in Pew. Small town, Pew. A little spit of a place, you wouldn't find this village on a map. No one writes home about the village square, about the drugstores and the pub. Harry is fascinated by the ocean. Pew is on the edge of old glacier-cliffs, steeper than imagination. He thinks of odd things, wandering up and down the streets, tan in the long sun. Mold-green eyes tilted up toward windmills and clouds and one hand sweeping his spider-dark hair back from a broad forehead with a bolt-scar. He likes it best when it rains and it rains often here. He eats peas. Spears them one by one, his little fork. Showers at night. Buys honey and apricot jam. We can paint you a story with only these basic facts. Let us just list the objects of Harry Potter's life.

_[A collection:_ _Wand and oilskin boots. Aftershave. Books. Scissors. A cup of tea. These ends of the bread. Plastic shopping bags. Receipts. Seven pairs of boxer shorts. Nail clippers. Leftover tuna and tomato. An old newspaper. Firewhisky. A lock of hair (black).]_

The newspaper lays on the side of his bed. Harry has charmed it to not fade. An old copy of the _Daily Prophet,_ this is the last time Harry had seen Severus Snape's photograph published. The man at the time of his arrest, glaring and imperious as always, his chin lifted in that ever-harsh pride, those ever-dark eyes daring the viewer. _Try me,_ it seems to say. The headline _Death Eater Severus Snape Apprehended Following Battle._ Harry and his too-curious fingers, rubbing at the same spot where the black hair falls, remembering that once he had touched it. Once he had brushed it out, greasy and coarse, for a prisoner waiting for a bit of bread, a dawdling axe.

Everything reminds him of Severus. The soil, which keeps him. The reach of space, dark as hair. Harry cuts a steak, his scrabble of fork and knife against the ceramic plate, and he thinks of the muscle below skin, what it would look like if the cover of Severus had been peeled away. ( _Don't tell anyone you think these things, you are mad._ ) _I held your blood in you once. That tear in your neck, open to the windpipe. I could see the inside of you (you are pink, the same as myself). I wanted to crawl in you. Maybe I loved you already. I don't know. I held your blood in you. It didn't matter._ The lock of hair is in his leather wallet. He takes it out sometimes, runs his fingers across it. A river of black. _Tell me the story of black._ (It was the only thing they had let him keep.)

 

* * *

 

He is out of bread. On a Sunday in May, he shuts and locks the door, ambles down the stairs. Out into a soft-sun road, past the long windows of the cafe on the corner.

Wait. A moment, please. Look closer at the window. Harry and his breathstorm on the pane of glass, close as he dares. He cups his hand up around his eyes to get a better look, unscattered by sun. _It's you._ (How can you not recognize the other side of a quotation mark?) Harry pauses, staring at the man angled like a bowsprit, bent over an old book at a little table. Tea or coffee in a paper cup (he cannot tell from here). You do not forget that nose. You do not forget that shroud of hair (Harry keeps some in his pocket, curled up in his leather wallet). You do not forget that snake-given scar. _You're alive._ How? How? Tell us how? Snape, condemned creature. Executed by a squad of Avada Kedavras. Yes, Harry has seen the signed and sealed document, the certificate of Snape's death. What is certain in life? Death and taxes? Yet, here he is, one Severus Snape, an interruption at an occasional table.

He orders a cup of Earl Grey. A bit of milk. One sugar. There is an empty spot at the table next to Snape. Harry sets his cup down, his bit of little breath. Snape doesn't glance over. There is the drag of ages. Snape licks his index finger, turns the page. _I might love you. I need you. You're alive._ And that hits. _Your life is my gunshot. Yes, you are hands to the wound, hands to an open throat, staunching the flow of blood. You tear me open, you sew me up._ Harry and his turnover heart, realizing the fact of it.

Nothing. Snape does not look up. The pages turn. Entire species are born and die in this moment.

"Erm, excuse me," Harry ventures.

“I already have a set of encyclopedias. You’re too late.” There is no recognition in the blank black eyes. No fury, no nothing. Just bored annoyance.

"What?"

"Oh, do you have something else equally useless to hawk?"

"No, I'm not selling anything. I just - thought you were someone I knew."

" _Clearly_ you were wrong."

 

* * *

 

 

Harry comes again the next day, sits in the empty spot at Snape’s crow-black elbow. This time, it only takes three minutes and forty-two seconds for Snape to huff and puff his feathers out. “ _What_ do you want?”

“Pardon?” Harry feigns innocence. It is Snape, there is no doubt in his mind. But there is no recognition, there is no history of hatred here. Only mild embers of anonymous annoyance. Somehow, that is worse. He has a strange inkling. _You're alive, you're alive. Thank god. They exiled you and lied to me. They lied to everyone. Did they Obliviate you? Where are your memories?_

“You’re following me. Why?” Snape narrows his eyes with the usual practice of the easily suspicious.

Harry shrugs. “You’ve got the only copy of _Jekyll and Hyde,_ sir. This library’s pretty shit, eh? Just waiting to see when you’re done.”

“Do buy yourself a copy,” Snape sneers with a soil-drying voice.

“Think I’d rather just wait for you.”

“Who are you?” Snape spits words like bullets from their barrel.

"No one, sir."

"Surely you have better things to do with your time, you nameless cretin."

"Not really," Harry grins, stirring a bit of honey into his tea. "Actually, seems to me that you're reading deliberately slowly."

"To irritate you to _leave me the bloody hell alone_."

"Well," he shrugs, "The way I figure it is, if you read faster, you'd get rid of me faster. So, really, you're kind of just keeping me around."

Snape glares. It warms Harry a bit, like holding hands over a stoked fire. The glare grows. He turns it on Harry, on the cafe. Finally, it settles on the unfortunate cup. “This brew is goddamn foul.”

“Oh?”

“Tastes like dead marmot.”

Harry stifles a laugh. He had missed the broken-plate voice, the sardonic drawl. He keeps his face steady, his smile well-guarded. “Have you had dead marmot, sir?”

Severus scowls. “Get out of here, you idiot boy.”

Then a moment. _I think I’m in love with you._ Yes, this man and his grimace of a face. The brutal damage to his throat, the heavy wear to his eyes. He is turning grey from age, from ash. Harry wants to reach out, to brush the hair back from Snape’s bitter melon glare, frowning at the black sludge in his cup. Tar and spit, yes. Harry and his suckerpunched lungs.

When he gets back to his rented room, he looks up the definition of the word _love._ Let us consider love.

 

_Love, noun._

 

  * __A strong feeling of attraction based on mutual kinship or ties.__


  * _Attraction based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers._



  

Harry slams the book shut, air from between the pages gusting in his face. _But what does that mean?_

 

* * *

 

"You're wasting your time. I'm never returning the blasted book."

"Well, I'll just have to keep bothering you then. They do a great London Fog here, did you know that?"

“Potter, look -“

Harry drops his cup against the saucer. “I _never_ told you my name.”

Snape is silent, green at the gills. He twitches a bit, in the eyelid first, the small finger on his cup. Harry knows what to look for. Look at the bouncing ankle, the fingertips rubbing over and over again at the handle of the ceramic cup. _You remembered me, you know who I am. It's you, you're in there. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it._

“Snape, are you remembering things? You have to _tell_ me. You have to -"

“ _Don’t._ ”

Harry leans closer. Heart like a wild bird. “God, you don't know, I've been looking for you. Please, god. I never told you -  Look, you have to tell me, Snape, have you started remembering? You remembered my name.”

“ _Don’t call me that,_ " Snape says, still with bite after all this time. He stands up, bumping the table in his haste to leave, slamming the glass door of the cafe. The book lays forgotten.

"Wait!" Harry yells. He runs, grabs the elbow of the maelstrom. Rain begins to spit on them, the heavy gathered clouds.

Snape turns, anger corroding him. The scar puckers in the twist of his fury. "Tell me then, if you have spent so _long_ looking for me.” The bleak eyes gleam in promised malice. “Tell me why I hate you.” And quieter still. “I do not remember that.”

_Oh._ “I thought we’d gotten -“

“What did you do?” Snape hisses. “I remember a cell. Why was I there? You were there. You left me there. To them.”

“Not willingly, not ever.” _I swear it._

Snape and his wide and wild eyes. He looks away, leaving Harry to stare at his dead-fish cheeks instead. _Let’s go slowly._ His hand without his own knowledge coming up to the black-sleeved forearm. Why is he getting closer? Why do we explore caves? Severus and his look back.

_I love you._ Harry presses his mouth to the other man’s. Severus grips at him, tight and confused and wanting, pulling Harry tight against his long, skinny frame. Nothing, the surprise of skin. Mouth to mouth to mouth again. Harry holds at Severus' lean body, the skinny bones of him and his long jacket. _Ask me to unbutton you, ask me how many, I have counted them all._

"I love you," he says. (It is the first time.) _I love you, I love you, I love you._

Severus stares at him, wild-eyed and dark. In a _crack,_ he Disapparates from Harry's hungry and gripping hands, leaving nothing but a bit of air.

 

* * *

 

_(A room, the present.)_

 

"I didn't think I'd see you again,” Harry and his whisper into a shoulder, into the pillow near him, into gunmetal hair and scar-torn skin.

"You weren't supposed to." A finger to the rise of his chest, the swell of a hip. Severus' hands wrapping around the root of him, working him like an oil pump, like a well. "There was later too."

"When?"

"Coming here."

 

* * *

  
_Will it change? Love? After all this time?_

_Yes._

_I don't want it to._

_No, it is better._

 

* * *

 

 

_Hogsmeade (We have come around again to the start. Back to a shack on a hill. The morning after.)_

_2005_

 

Have you heard this one? Unlikely. Who has? There is no reason to tell it, not truly. No one remembers the one about the quiet sea.

Let me assure you, the trouble with sleeping is that we must wake. Severus can feel the light through the windows already, the stream of pale sunshine, the first movements of the dawn. This bit of astronomical twilight, the barest paling of black to navy. Then nautical dawn, bright enough for sailors to see the horizon, to distinguish the everlong black now into sky and sea. They are somewhere here, yes, somewhere between indigo and cobalt. Our bodies are too keyed to the earth, we cannot ignore the dawn. He lays and breathes for awhile. The old in and out. Oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. He is too aware of the recycling of air. How many lungs has it been in before? Which ones? Who has it touched (it is in him now)? In the dawn, before losing the fight to the day, he likes to pretend that the air is new and untouched. He is the only one breathing, the only creature left alive in the world.

Severus groans. Where has he fallen asleep? This is no softness. He can smell stale firewhisky, fetid alcohol. The stench of the Shack. The wet of rain. His shoulders yell at him, misery already in the scrape of his shoulder blades.

He opens his eyes into the sick clutch of undergrowth, Mossy and dark. Woven with gold and flecks of woodrot. "Hullo," Harry _goddamn_ Potter says, a smile at the edge of his rotten mouth.

" _Potter_ ," he hisses.

"Guilty as charged."

"Get _out_ ," he shifts away, away. Back, further back. "Do not dare to tell _anyone_ \- "

"No."

"Don't make me hex you."

"With what wand?"

Severus narrows his eyes.

"You remember me," Harry says. "You're remembering more, aren't you?"

"Unfortunately." _Yes, yes, yes, all the time._ Perhaps it is his skill in Legilimency. Perhaps the Obliviator had done a shitstain job. We'll never know. The memories had seeped back into him like a backed-up sewer. It chokes him, the smell of the past. The war. The battle. The dead. His brutal father, his too-proud mother. Potter. Fucking, goddamned _Potter,_ the worst of them all.

"Why did you run?" Harry asks, quiet.

" _Look at me._ " _Who wouldn't have run?_ Harry's hand reaches out as gentle as a glassblower's (be careful, careful of the glass bones of him). He hesitates softly, his fingers just over the half-ruin of Severus' face. Yes, a face like the Colosseum, half-destroyed, left wanting and ill-explained. But there is nothing of the explorer in those fingers, nothing demands explanation. His touch comes soft on the riptides and currents of the awful scarring, over the ghost of a once-eyebrow, the mottled pink and white of his cheek like a mountain range seen from above. The tight edges. The burn, the itch. His fingers tickle slightly, running down along the chin, over the throat.

"I like it." Then, after a pause. "And you. I missed you."

"You're a fool."

A bit of a smile, "Yes, maybe."

"Where will I go, Potter?" He glares, his bit of violence in his mouth and eyes.

"You can come with me," Potter says, "Stay awhile."

"I am a convicted felon. And _dead_ , if you haven't quite forgotten."

Potter shrugs, _details_ his shoulders seem to say. “About that, sir -“

“What unfortunate thing are you about to utter?”

“I submitted your pardon a few months ago.”

“Why?”

Harry shrugs, “You know how I am.”

 

* * *

 

In 1998, Severus Snape had tangled with a snake (had helped kill one too). In 2005, Apparating into a warm room of overstuffed chairs and half-finished tea, Severus comes back to the world. Seven years.

Harry’s house is in Tintagel. The West Country, where Harry had begun, where he had first gulped at air, first cried for his mother. Tintagel is flung out further along this spike of land into the Atlantic, the Lizard of Britain. The land rolls, green and strange, rich with stories of magic and legend from times long before either of them. Age does not matter much here, when you count the stones of Tintagel Castle as a thousand years old. The difference then between twenty-five and forty-five doesn’t matter. He likes the moortwisted trees best, the branches warped by the strong winds into odd and unsettling shapes. He likes to walk at night. The house, Potter's house, is a simple thing. Stucco walled and brightly colored. There is nothing of logic to the ramble. The rusticated house is detached from any other, set apart in its garden. Washed with a bit of yellow. Everything about the house is strange and discontinuous. Disjointed. Nothing matches; nothing goes. In that, at least, there is an odd constancy, a bit of something to count on. It is a little like Potter, himself, unpredictable, surprising, steady.

Severus has never been here before. Harry fusses to get the house ready. Washes the laundry, fluffs the towels, scrapes the scum from the tub and the callus from the soap. Stuffs the boxes and the unplanned in the hall closet. Harry has studied the bits of Severus in the open (and the shaded parts too). Severus sees the Ceylon tea in the jar (Harry drinks Earl Grey). Strange how we can be wounded by kindness. It aches. An arrow in the wing.

“Be careful,” Harry says, as Severus watches the water, antsy with the coming storm. Harry has learned that Severus is always restless in rain and takes walks in it, coming back soaked as a drowned rat.

“The _irony_ of you saying that, Potter.”

“Look, those cliffs come outta nowhere in the dark. One bad step and you’ve got bigger problems than _irony._ ”

Severus glares. Takes his jacket from the hook, the one that Harry never sets anything on. Silently, the hook has become _Severus_ '. (He does not think about that, that he has a hook in the kitchen, that he has a little guest room with turned-down sheets and towels set out. That he knows which way to turn the knob in Potter's shower to get hot water.)

 

* * *

 

He comes back an hour later. The kettle is on.

“Do you want tea?”

“No.”

“A glass of water?”

“If that is what it will take to shut up your infernal fussing.”

Harry grins.

So, he drinks a glass of water. Watches Harry in the kitchen. The odd, unexpected comfort of seeing someone perfectly aware of their body in a space, where to move their legs, their hips. Which cupboards to open, which drawers to close. Severus learns where the cups are kept, which brand of mustard to buy, where the postbox is. He knows Harry likes to leave the television on for noise and rarely watches it, that he falls asleep on the sofa with his socks half on and a book falling to the floor. He learns to pick the book up from Harry’s chest before it falls, to mark his place.

He watches Harry sometimes. (Harry watches him back.) It has been four weeks. They have not discussed it, the night in the cell. They have not talked about it, the fumble in Pew. Severus and Harry, quietly manning their rudders, aiming for port. (They will get there, won't they?)

Harry looks up over the _Daily Prophet,_ “Did you hear about the DNA stuff?” _The soulmate stuff._

“Yes.” Drink the water, reread the sentence, ignore the brat.

“What do you think?”

“It’s rubbish.”

“Aw, you think so?” Harry rubs the back of his neck, refilling the kettle. “I was thinking about getting mine done.”

"I am not preventing you."

"I thought you might too."

“I do not believe that my cooperation in this absurd profiteering has any connection to your own.”

“You really don’t want to know if you have a soulmate out there?” Harry pauses, gets out biscuits too. Severus frowns. He doesn't want to know; he does. He says he doesn't believe in love; he is a romantic.

He arches a brow, “A genetic predisposition to a high magical compatibility is _hardly_ a soulmate, Potter.”

“Right. Of which, the likelihood of that occurring is just somehow exactly the odds of, oh, I don’t know, one other person in the world? Alright, if you get it done, I will too.”

“For what blasted reason would I care to know your soulmate, Potter?”

Harry shrugs, “Look, do you want eggs?”

"If you insist that I must eat."

Harry laughs, "I do." The boy at the stove, the kettle on. Heavy and iron. Severus leaves to wash his face with cool water from the sink basin. A shower, water poured over him like it might over a cliff. Harry has put fresh soaps out, as he always does. A clean, white towel. He rubs himself with the terrycloth. Knocks the bit of water from his ear canal, the soap from between his fingers.

_I love you._ Yes, it is there on his tongue like the Greeks had put coins in the mouths of their dead. It is too much, it might just fall out one of these days when he isn't careful. _Did you pick up milk?_ Harry will say. _Yes,_ Severus will respond. _I love you,_ he will say without thinking. As if it is the weather, as casual as breathing. Constant vigilance. (It is harder, the longer it stretches on unsaid. He should just gut it out. Say it, yes. Harry won't laugh at him, he has learned that. Yet, somehow, leaving it this long, he feels like a fool.)

There it is, his hands ghosting over the two toothbrushes on the sink. Blue and green. He picks his up, this strange intimacy. Have you ever known that you will touch someone in love, will peel their shirt from then, make love to they and their body too, and known it with no curl of desire? There is no heat in this abstract awareness (it will come and soon), only the admittance of the truth. They are fumbling together. In this reactor, eventually, all particles must merge.

He comes out from the bathroom. Harry is passing by, carrying a stack of folded towels.

_Sod it._ Severus grabs Harry by the elbow (the way he had been grabbed once in the rain). Pulls the other man close against his body, the two of them on either side of a door, their hearts knocking together. Harry's glasses go askew, their noses hit slightly. Their mouths finally, _yes yes yes, the taste of you._ He closes his eyes to the feel of the other man's wide hands cupping his skull, pulling at his shoulders. Two starving creatures, trying to eat each other alive.

_I love you._

This tangled knot of them. This knock of the two of them, the fumble together to Harry's bedroom. It is cloud-dark, yes. This had begun in the rain once, once upon a time in a shack on a hill. It is raining again.

"Take it off," Harry whispers, pulling at the shirt. _Yes, whatever you want._ They lay down in the bed. Harry's twin. Severus is too old for the small bed, too old to fit side-by-side in this too-little space. It doesn't matter (it never has). He will live in the six inches that he is allotted, safe between Harry and the wall.

Harry is so open with his body. Expansive. Easy. As if this, Severus and Harry and the bed against the wall, were the simplest of things. Who are you undressing, the monster or the lover? _Yes, I am two-in-one, I am two incompletes that will never make a whole. You cannot put a jackal's head on a headless body and call it a man. Who am I? Who are you undressing? Will you be horrified? What if this is not what you asked for?_ Yes, this moment of held breath, this moment of waiting. We can only offer ourselves. He can only offer his skinny ribs and the concave split of his lower belly, the coarse hairs of him and the scars too. What if this is not what we wanted? What if he hears, waiter, waiter, excuse me, take this back to the kitchen, I'll have the fish instead?

"Take this off too," Harry says, easing the trousers from Severus' waist. He wants to apologize for the sweat, say _I'll get it._ But Harry is there already, his eyes never dimming, his touch just as urgent, as if to say _I touched nothing less than seawater._ (How can a sailor not love the sea?)

It is quiet. There is the sound of breath. Outside, the sound of early crickets. They have taken their time. There has been no rush. The end of the world is slow. He and the question marks of his fingers. Severus has always been too curious, too hungry, too wanting, too much. He draws his index finger along the cut of Harry's cheekbone, he trails it along the mouth. Pushing his fingers into Harry's mouth is like parting an orange, like pushing between two segments. Soft, filled to bursting.

There is a moment we call the singularity. He has never approached it, this two-part man. It is different learning change. He has never been an incomplete sum, no, never something that did not add up. He has been an equation all this time. Yes, he has _a_ and he is _b_ , always, but _x_ has been the unknown part. He swallows Harry up with his whole body, his cells and his skin, worshiping beauty, worshiping dust. Solving for _y_ . Yes, god, yes, together, this sum of the two of them, this product, this solution. It does not matter, the two of them together. Who needs language when there is the slap of skin, the rockpools of our salted sweat, brackish inlets between our thighs. Severus and his sink into Harry's open body, his mouth desperate and starving. _Will you get tired of me?_ (How can we get tired of air?)

_Thank you_ , he wants to say, alien words on an alien tongue. He falls asleep with his head buried in Harry's neck, his nose in Harry's shoulder, his hair across Harry's chest. One of Harry's hands comes up, brushes it from his eyes, these long bleak strands of night, smooths his hand over the fall of hair. Our skin is constantly sloughing off, our cells constantly replacing each other. We lose close to forty-thousand skin cells per day to the air. Severus breathes the air, which is littered with bits of themselves scattered like salt in the sea. When he breathes, he breathes Harry in, safe within his own lungs.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he panics. _You cannot expect this to go on forever. It will fall apart (I will ruin it)._ _Do not look too close at me (you never fucking listen). There is more than just me in there. Two part Snape. Jekyll and Hyde. Monster and louse too._

The sound of the kitchen door startles him. "Hello," Harry says, grinning to his aphid eyes, holding up a clutch of oranges. "Have you heard? It looks like rain."

“Yes, it does,” Severus murmurs, “Cover the bush with the marine-ply this time. Last time we got a bloody rain like this, it lost half its damn leaves.”

“Of course.” (Dry kiss on the shoulder.) _It isn’t about the escallonia._

_Who has touched you? Who has loved the long planks of you? Tell me about the tongues that have tasted your navel, the Dead Sea of you, the fingers in your mouth._ The Dead Sea is a misnomer. We have a habit of looking for lives like our own. What about the plankton and the algae, what about the thermoextremists? What about Severus, the drowning man, who has finally found a perfectly balanced sea? A sea with more buoyancy, where he cannot sink. (He is a forgetful sailor. He has forgotten something, that heavy things do not sink if they surround enough air. Severus, with your Jekyll within, gulping down air, you cannot sink. The iceberg might get at you, yes. That is the privilege of men over steel ships, we can heal.)

"You've got a letter."

"Oh," Harry sets his bags down, the bit of fruit. Apples spill out. Cod and haddock. Bread and milk. The jam Severus likes. (Apricot.)

"Well," he hisses, "Get on with it, open it." _Tell me the rotten truth._

"I'll wait."

He thinks of soulmates. Strange notion. We have dreamt of soulmates long before we have discovered these odd statistics. The letter taunts him, sitting on the kitchen table. He aches to _know. Is there a name in there? Is it mine? (What if it is not?)_ Later, lying in bed he asks, “Did you look at your -“

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“I won’t ask you to do it, I’ll never make you,” Harry says. (Sometimes these are our gifts.) There is a long quiet. They breathe, the blankets shifting with them. Harry says nothing. Severus says nothing. They lay in the bed, challenging each other with their bits of nothing.

 

* * *

 

_The present again, two gunmetal-haired men in bed. Twenty years later._

 

"One more," Severus hisses, "One more." 

_Yes yes yes yes. God, I love you._

"Oh god, I'll die." Harry strains, the long lines of his neck obvious. He is gentle and soft as a blade, knifing into Severus' body. Precious as a cave, careful as arms collecting up beloved things. Shells maybe, books perhaps. Or Severus too. Over and above, within and without. Severus likes this best, Harry surrounding him, these strong arms clutching him together like mountains might squeeze a rockpath. _Fuck me like you need to, like you have to. Tell me you would die without me._ (He would say these things if he could force them past his mouth, get over the nerves and the shame, the embarrassment too. Instead, he moans as Harry pulls on him. Hot hand on his metal-hot cock, driving them both to ruin.)

A slick hand, rough and tumble. _You and I laid out against the sheets, the sky, the stars. Tell me, tell me. When did you love me best?_ Can we dare to ask? Can we say _don't let me be a bother but can you tell me a little of when you loved me? Let me pour it out for you. Hold out your cup. If I do not tell you now, who will tell these stories later?_

"I love you, I love you, I love you." It bursts from him then, from the white explosion of his mind.

 

* * *

 

_Is this alright then? If I love you?_

_Yes. I can manage._

_Do you love me?_

_Like a grave loves the dead; like a shipwreck loves the sea. Tell me, do you have all night?_

 

* * *

 

One more, let us look at the greycloud sky, let us look at the spit of rain. The ocean is dark and handsy, saying _let me remind you that I hate to be left alone._ Look here at the ramshackle house and the well-tended garden. Look at the clock on the wall saying _work, Ministry, home, mortal peril._

It has been raining. It is morning. (Severus Snape is sixty-five years old; Harry Potter is forty-five.)

A letter has come. It sits on the table. A letter promising to analyze a witch or a wizard’s DNA. _Find your magical soulmate!_ Severus scowls at it. It bears his name. Harry had done his twenty years ago and never spoken a word of the name within. This is Severus'. He had cut himself, sealed his little bit of spit and blood in the vial and sent it off. Curiosity eating at him, toes up. Up the calves, up the thighs, the chest of him, making it difficult to breathe. _What name is in there? Is it yours? (Does it matter?)_

“I made you eggs," Harry calls from the kitchen.

“You’re bollocks at it. You always have been.”

“You wouldn’t eat them if I was.”

“I suffer your little kindnesses,” Severus drawls.

“Shut up, you git.” (There is a smile in it.) Harry comes out, an apron tied at the waist, grey in his hair and glasses smudged. He has a bit of egg on his manila-tan cheek. He slows when he sees Severus standing at the console table, the one that has been in their front hall for ten years now, that has a collection of shoes under it and keys on top. Unopened mail. A green windbreaker tossed casually over it. Severus stands and holds the letter. Hair falling past his face (mostly silver now).

"You don't have to open it."

"I know."

Later, lying in bed, Severus will pull Harry tight against his body. These familiar roads. _Take me home._ “Thank you,” he whispers, whisky-voiced.

“For what?”

“Not making me open that letter.” It still sits on the occasional table, waiting for a letter opener to knife it open. What is printed there? Do you have a _marco_ to your _polo_ , Severus? _What if your name is not there?_ (He is a meager man, he cannot promise to not doubt, to not wonder too much, to not fuck this up. If there is no name, if there is another name, he knows his own self-sabotage too well. He doesn’t ask what name is on Harry’s letter. Harry presses dry lips to his hair, he doesn’t offer.)

“I’ll never ask you to do something you don’t want to.”

Tell me about soulmates. Are we born with them? Do we make them? The question is of our nature. Are we fixed or mutable? Severus has always assumed that his nature was fixed. Now he wonders. His arms around the other man, this blacknest-haired man. This anchor, this tether. They are warm here and shucked of names (they do not need them). Here, in bed, in this little house, we go by only _you_ and _me._ It is simple. I say _come to dinner, love._ You say, _I left the stove on, honey._ We don't need names when it is just the two of us alone. No, in bed there is no Harry, there is no Severus. _You and me, me and you. No one else._

Let me tell you a love poem (I have been all along). Let us consider decades. Long memorized stories, long beloved maps. We lie in the stories, telling only of the first flush of love, the first fall. The passion, yes, and the hunger too. We do not love less when the book is well-read, when we are well-fed. Take your time, go slower. Harry opens him up to his favorite chapters, his favorite pages. When we make love to old lovers, when we open old books, we remember every time we have cracked the spine before. _Read to me my favorite bits,_ Harry had said. So Severus had told the story of the Shack and the moth-eaten wool. Had dusted off a story of a man in a cell. And here now, the last bit, Severus leaning into Harry’s ear, whispering safe to the center of him, _let me show you the newest chapter. This is the bit I’ve been working on. Do you like it?_

Outside, Severus watches the clouds break. The rains have stopped. Dry now, the promise of warmth. We do not tell ghost stories on sunny days. What do we know of ghost stories? That ghosts are dead, they do not have bodies to wash, hair to trim, nails to clip, no. Severus checks his heart, the echo of the one below him. They sound back, they are alive.

There is a letter unread downstairs. Unopened. We will never know the name within. Envelopes and their letters do not matter. Pick up that quill, that bit of parchment (the wide back of your lover), write your name in there yourself.

 

* * *

 

_Do you love me? Tell me, will you love me to the end of the world?_

_Always._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Of particular note, I think I need to give thanks to Jeanette Winterson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning the most, with some additional notes to Carol Ann Duffy (since I am voraciously reading her and she undoubtedly had influence on this strange thing).


End file.
